Simple, Tileable EARLY SMELTING Designs | Factorio 0.18 Tutorial/Guide/How-to

[@Nilaus]

All Master Class Blueprints are available on FactorioBin Overview and direct links to all Blueprints: nilaus.atlassian.net/l/cp/HBEUm524 (Pastebin links no longer work)

[@canebro1]

This is probably one of the greatest Factorio series. While I may design mine a little different, I do love how you explain your design decisions and why you chose them.

[@Soandnb]

6:00 for those of you wondering about the math behind this: if you look at the info panel of any furnace, you'll notice it has Energy Consumption (Burner), the stone furnace having 90kW. If you look at the info panel of other fuels, when you get to that stage in the game, you'll notice their Energy density. In the case of Coal, it's 4MJ. A Watt is a Joule per Second, so essentially 90kW = 90kJ/s. Using that, you can figure out how long an individual fuel lasts, and how much of any type of fuel you will need for smelting arrays. For an individual furnace, the duration the fuel lasts is: "Fuel Value" in Joules / Furnace's "Energy Consumption" in Watts = Duration And the amount of fuel for an array you need will be: # of Furnaces / Duration

[@DoctorCalcium]

Thats awesome math thanks for the info man

[@Borthralla]

Personally I like to rush electric furnaces so that by the time I need to run trains to larger patches I can use on-site smelting and transport the plate instead of the ore. Once the starting patches are depleted I remove the smelters at my base except for steel and stone brick. For steel and stone brick, I only smelt as needed and the rest of the iron/stone goes to the bus. I like this way of doing things because it makes the main base less cluttered. It also doubles train capacity since plate can be stacked to 100. For the early game though I really like these blueprints.

[@EgnachHelton]

but it's extremely efficient in early to mid game to smelt things using coal. One belt of coal can smelt 4 belts of iron, 2 belts of copper, 0.4 belt of steel, and 4 belts of stone bricks at the same time. By contrast, producing electricity using coal in early game is very inefficient.

[@Em15490]

That steel column is awesome! Never seen that way before it's brilliant!

[@Cassin1306]

Just passed 440h on the game, and I'm still learning. This steel setup is awesome !

[@Nortonius_]

Tightest way of bringing coal into this columns I’ve seen you do yet!

[@powerpc6037]

For the steel, you can also build the first column to only make iron plates but feed the middle belt downwards towards the input at the bottom of the column, let it hop over into the second column to make steel from it. That way, you have both separated and you don't have to swap the direction of the inserters to work from a middle belt outwards like you did here. And you also keep the same width of both smelter columns.

[@Chaosrising82]

Well I hoped to see how to make max compression blue belts with electric furnaces, but still thank you for your effort to make this one. Personally I prefer to hook furnaces for iron straight to steel furnaces, since 1 iron plate is 3.2s, 1 steel requires 5 irons and produced in 16, so it's pretty effective that way

[@the1Blind]

If you use the filter splitter in the steel setup to filter out iron ore instead of filtering in coal, the design becomes multifuel capable.

[@marcusc3288]

I've been looking forward to this

[@TheSauceBoss]

I really think this one should come before the circuits in the playlist..

[@shadowhenge7118]

I do stone brick in a single column. You can get a full belt out of 2 input stone belts on a single column.

[@louca6549]

You can see at 13:06 that the iron plate output belts are somewhat side imbalanced, because when they merge into the single steel array feed line, the left side has priority to merge into the belt before the right side. This seems to cause the right side to pile up. Since the smelters in the iron plate arrays have inserters that can only output on one side of the belt, does this not cause the smelters on the left side of the column to have their output blocked? Or is this all solved at steady state due to equal production and consumption rates of both arrays?

[@artwork8557]

I created a cool setup for steel. It's basically the standard setup for smelters but I made it double wide. So 2 sides of iron plates fill belts on one side and the coal is fed from the standard setup onto the iron plate belt. Then the inside smelters grab coal and iron plates and feed them into the inside smelters and then I have a single belt of steel coming out. This way is probably a simpler set up but really long. My setup is more wide. Idk what is better but I like it

[@YellowGoddess]

You can also take the coal for the steel with a sideways underground belt that only takes from the coal side. You don't need the filter splitter at all. That way it fits next to any other smelting column.

[@Nilaus]

then it will be longer than the other columns, hence I preferred this option

[@YellowGoddess]

@@Nilaus why does it become longer? If you replace the splitter with a straigth pice and use a halfbelt to take the coal in place of the belt coming out of the splitter and feeding the steel lane (if i'm making any sense ^^) i think it should be the same length. Am I missing something?

[@Jay-fy4zy]

I'm surprised you went with that particular steel setup. If you direct insert iron into another furnace you can use them next to any other setup. Its just a little wider than a copper or stone smelter. You just have to use the bigger power poles because there is no room with all of the inserters but it is compact and efficient. I use a blueprint from @ KitchsVideos

[@DavidLindes]

Congrats on 50K! :) (Re 17:11 - which is apparently obsolete, because you're currently listing at 50.1K!)

[@jthoward]

Will there be a late game smelting master class? Or one for trains for that matter, I’d love to have a nilaus train book. P.S. will you go through and add snapping to your blueprints once they add it?

[@Nilaus]

snapping? We made some cool train designs this week on my Twitch stream and late game smelting will come "later"

[@jthoward]

Nilaus Really cool new feature they’re looking at for one of the upcoming releases, look at the latest Friday facts. They’re going to make it so you can add boundaries to blueprints. It’s to address the issue of dragging blueprints and then placing on top of each other. It’ll be best for tile wall designs, train books, and walls. Quote: Snapping This is a great example of a feature, that I expected to be done quickly and easily... but you know how it goes. The first problem is related to build and drag. Most of the blueprints don't work that well when you just build and drag them. The second problem is that blueprints are often designed to work in a grid, but there is no way to enforce it. Either you have to build slowly and cautiously, or you misclick often. And with the new feature of building in map, the problem was just elevated. This is what the second checkbox is for, it forces the blueprint to be built in a grid aligned to the map center. To ensure, that the user can configure individual blueprints in a way that they would match perfectly, the relative position of the blueprint to the grid can be configured by moving the red flag. Thanks to Boskid, our beloved tester, a big pile of bugs had been already identified and fixed, so there is a chance of the BP library being released next week. GIFs on the post make it more clear.

[@canebro1]

The late game designs for smelting aren't too interesting. With the 2 tile wide restriction due to beacons, there isn't much room for different designs. The only real question you need to answer is if you are doing a 8 or 12 beacon setup. Additionally, the design would be pretty similar to some of your other builds, that are 1 to 1 (or 2 to 1 if you can combine the inputs onto a single belt).

[@Teneombre]

You will not built tone of this blueprint in one go anyway so the snapping does not really matter from my point of view. Since the blueprint will be easily editable anyway, it will be easy to add it (by yourself or other means)

[@jthoward]

Teneombre yeah, I’m more talking about any train blueprints, or tileable ones

[@klonanbrown2807]

Your contents are well explained and super helpful! Thank you!

[@kiledamgaardasmussen5222]

You can move the splitter one tile further inwards

[@KuchenSalat_]

I am a new Factorio player and watchef a lot of your videos, 2 days ago i askef myself when you will do a smelting masterclass, well there you go :D

[@benjamincasatimcintosh2918]

OHH FFS JUST WHEN I FINISH MY SMELTING

[@Nilaus]

sorry, what else are you working on so I know what to do a tutorial on next ;)

[@benjamincasatimcintosh2918]

Well I'm about to get oil, would love a tutorial on a robot,lasers and solar panel blueprint + a guide on setting up logistic storage

[@AvonaStar]

@@benjamincasatimcintosh2918 Make sure to tell Nilaus when you've completed your robots, lasers, and solar panels so that we can get those guides! ^_^

[@kevingallineauii9353]

Excelent video. I am about to watch the late game smelting one instead. I love how they fit perfectly into the city blocks. I am going with a different design and need a beaconed electric furnace smelter for stone bricks. Thanks for the videos though!

[@troelshansen6212]

A thing I would actually recommend when building your stone (and steel) furnace smelting array, is to move the input belt out by an extra tile and use long handed inserters to load stone and steel furnaces. Why? Because the electric furnace is one tile bigger in both dimensions, and you almost always forget to leave room for it, which means you'll have to tear up your entire smelting array and move all belts around when it's time to upgrade to electic furnaces. By using longhanded inserters from the onset, your belts are already in the correct positions to accomodate electric furnaces.

[@nicheman4455]

I use this design religiously in early game(discovered the design before this video) but I've never figured to load coal from the side, I always bring it up along with the ore, and I must say I think I like your way better

[@pauljs75]

A slightly different spacing with two furnaces between power poles can cut the power poles needed for a stone or steel furnace line in half. Other than that, it's the same. Sometimes handy if one doesn't want to spend as much time chopping wood early game or if trees aren't nearby in a desert starting area. Makes the production line a little longer lengthwise, but in most cases that's negligible.

[@pi4313]

where the leftover regular iron plate prod

[@Hectorlph]

Coal and ore on the same line... why didn't I think of that. Great tips.

[@TNEngie]

The description's timestamps are for the video on nuclear power

[@Nilaus]

Not anymore. Fixed now

[@seanbills3559]

Super helpful video for me. I am in my first 50 hours (around 35) and am enjoying learning about how to increase efficiency from what I've started on my own. Really great info that I'm already implementing in my game. My only question, and someone lmk if I missed a comment with the answer (or if I missed in video), how many drills would I need to supply a half belt and full belt for these columns? I'm assuming coal and iron/copper would need the same amount of supply drills. Anyone know?

[@reilly2828]

You can input coal like that? I had mad a super over complicated array with a lot of wasted space to import call on a whole separate line.

[@Marshal-SO2]

Keep up the good work, ur vids are amazing!

[@terrydactyl2077]

The layout looks so much easier than other tutorials I’ve seen. For me as a noob that is. And I mean the “city block” layout. So can you always fit every type of setup into these city blocks all the way to rockets?

[@Eduardo_1980]

Why are you using the middle belt as Output and not the one of the sides?

[@441milachik]

7:39 how you build soo fast without character and no builing robot? In God mode it is impossible because there is no character inventory and personal roboport. So how you can build anywhere like you have roboport?

[@mikec3749]

at 3:32 what hotkeys are you using to copy and paste that easily?

[@mikec3749]

aha figured it out, literally ctrl c lol

[@edwylin6815]

It could be wrong. The wiki say that the stone smelter produce 0.28 iron plate per second, and the yellow conveyor is 15 items per second, so you would need 7.5/0.28= 26.8 smelter per line (53.6 in total). Same goes with the steel smelter at the speed of 0.57 iron plate per second (in the wiki), so 15/0.57 = 26.3 smelter per line (52.6 in total). Could some explain me?

[@brentsandstrom5967]

One of the songs from factorio sounds like the intro from the song Killpop

[@hedgie9823]

Why not just direct insert from furnace to furnace for steel production? It saves space, it's just wider

[@Cruesoe]

These are really improving my play style. Keep it up!

[@ChrislyBear]

Couldn't you filter out both half lanes of coal (at the steel design) using the half-underground trick in the middle of the two iron columns? So you wouldn't need the stone brick burning next to the steel. Or do you need a full belt of coal later?

[@SolarEclipse-l6y]

why not combine coal outside the loop？the result is the same but the line is clearer. has some reason？

[@Rpython1]

Hi really like your vid, it’s so helpful. I copied it exactly. I’ve got 30 electric miners feeding 48 plate stone furnaces. After a while the last 2 furnaces start to run out of ore, why is this? Many thanks

[@gopher697]

Is there ever a reason on these types of builds to upgrade the yellow grabbers to blue or further?

[@dougfoster445]

My copper ore won’t make it to the end of the furnaces with this setup 😔. After like the 10th furnace it runs out

[@robinelliott1471]

This video was surprisingly useful

[@huntershank2943]

135h later and ill never do smelting the same. Great video!

[@nightfighter4327]

the base in the book smelting was a bit better (for steel at least)because the coal was on the outside of the belt and cant seem to find it anymore :/ had it on my last world but copy it on my recent one

[@ProWhitaker]

Thanks for the video

[@falsifyingdream]

New to the game and I have a question. What do you mean by 'full belt'? What is the length of a full belt, and how many mining drills do you have feeding into it?

[@seanbills3559]

I have this question as well

[@marlounsiaotong5484]

what mod is the chest that produces full blet of items?

[@Nilaus]

Editor Extended

[@cfhnyy]

Steel with stone smelters is a neat design

[@andreww6026]

What size are your ciry blocks?

[@grandfremdling3841]

At 13:16 you could place the splitter one tile to the right and it will work for eternity, am i wrong?

[@PeterNLewis]

If you mean the splitter that filters the coal, if it was one position to the right, then since the coal is on the right hand side of the belt, it could not enter the underground loaded from the side (and if you filtered the coal to the left of the splitter and then turned it in to the underground, the ore on the left hand side of the belt would leak in to the underground by side loading from the right hand side of the splitter). I think.

[@grandfremdling3841]

@@PeterNLewis yes, thank you! I forgot the leakage!

[@LTBurger]

How big are your city blocks?

[@mainwon]

How does he copy an paste them ? Using blue prints ? Is there a video on that from him ?

[@brasilvirals]

How mode is this that generate ore?

[@blucky_yt]

Will there be a similar video for electric furnaces?

[@fast1nakus]

I love using no manipulators at all, only small inserters. Definitely more pricey, and bulkier but looks better to my eye

[@henir27]

I like the direct insertion steel one better, and the setup shown isnt really news to me (plus direct insertion has smaller footprint)

[@geaux13saints56]

Just realized there’s no video for sulfur/sulfuric acid

[@andyyang5234]

Is there any specific reason not prepare it for late game (i.e., electric furnace) smelting as well? Leaving one extra space to two sides of the stone furnace would do the trick. Granted, it takes up a bit of extra space, but save for the "quirk" of being able to fit neatly into a city block, there seems to be no reason space should be a constraint in Factorio.

[@lorandpetok6044]

When you transition to electric furnaces you usually also have beacons and modules. Combining those will actually make you use less space than the stone and steel furnace setup, so leaving space for the larger electric furnace does not pay off. You are better of if you completely redo the smelting columns when you upgrade from steel to electric furnaces.

[@mobius1qwe]

Normally some things Nilaus doesn't build with modular upgrade in mind, so to upgrade you basically demolish everything down and rebuild the newest version. Besides, you can go with the burner furnaces to pack up enough materials to fully build electric setup that is ready for beacons and modules, usually in a better location than where you place your burners

[@Nilaus]

In my opinion; you do not use Electric until you start using Modules and Beacons. At that point you will have robots and the base will be completely different

[@DanielHartz]

Is a "City Block" a standardized thing?

[@canebro1]

Sort of. The idea of a city block is just a way to separating the map. There are different sizes based on different things (big power poles, roboports, radar, and/or train length). Each persons city block is also slightly different. Do you include walking paths or trains? What do your intersections looks like? How do incorporate train stops into your design?

[@Nilaus]

I'll make a short tutorial on that "soon"

[@singleturbosupra7951]

Like canebro said, it's like the main bus. The concept itself is pretty standard, meaning pretty much everyone uses it, but you can make it the way you want and there are many ways to make it. For example I make cityblock almost the same as Nilaus except my big power poles are always the full wire length apart from each other, then a roboport next to every big power pole. Then after every 4 power poles I have a walking path, having it right in the middle of the last power pole from the previous cityblock and the first power pole in the next cityblock. Makes the big power poles look better, I absolutely hate having 2 big power poles right close to each other lol.

[@DanielHartz]

@@canebro1 Right I get that. Nilaus just made comment that "a" city block can fit 8 of those arrays. I've done huge city blocks for 5K SPM or tiny ones for like 250 SPM. I wasn't aware of any size standardization or if he was just trying to set a standard. I have no gray area about what a city block is...just the standardization of its size.

[@canebro1]

@@DanielHartz Gotcha. Nilaus has a standard size he likes to use for all his games. IIRC it is 3 big power poles with then a 4 tile walkway on each side.

[@RoryBecker]

Which mod did you use to provide your infinite loaders?

[@ezekielnewren3336]

Editor Extensions I think mods.factorio.com/mod/EditorExtensions

[@RoryBecker]

@@ezekielnewren3336 Thanks Bud. that's exactly what I needed :)

[@torment808]

is there a paste bin?

[@joshuajanicki7713]

pastebin.com/sAzMm6cm

[@siggyno5871]

What mods do u use?

[@svenjavock45]

Hey, I have two questions. First is, how did you put all the concret down? I just cant find the cheat or the funktion for it. Second one is, what mod are the underground belts that spawn the items? I would love to use them to test stuff out. Would love an answer, cause I really like your descriptions. :)

[@jeepers1754]

First, probably just with a nice mall and some blueprints he'd already created Second, Editor Extensions is the mod name :)

[@stradus64]

Thoughts on rushing steel furnaces? I never make more than few stone furnaces, just try to get steel ones ASAP

[@singleturbosupra7951]

For me the steel furnaces are kinda useless before you start upgrading your bus to red belts. For red belts you need 48 steel furnaces, so might as well just build 48 stone furnaces in the beginning, makes it easier to upgrade. Only thing I see as a gain from going straight to steel furnaces is that after you start upgrading the furnaces the stone ones are literally useless, you can't use them for anything really. So there is a minor material gain to be had with stone ore. But other than that, might as well just use stone furnaces in the beginning

[@Nilaus]

You will get stall the progress of the rest of the base by directing so much Iron to the Steel Furnaces. It is obviously your choice, I just find that I use Stone Furnaces for a long time. I prefer 8 columns of Stone Furnaces over 4 columns of Steel Furnaces

[@jeffreyblack666]

The major dislike I have with this is that it would require basically a complete rebuild when you get to electric furnaces. Or would you suggest not using them and sticking to coal?

[@Nilaus]

Only switch to Electric when you intend to add Modules and Beacons. There is really no point earlier

[@jeffreyblack666]

@@Nilaus What about with solar or nuclear power to keep coal for other things like plastic?

[@ToppledTurtle834]

Why don't you just put the filter splitters 1 to the right, then you don't have to worry about what's to the left of the build

[@nickidk4]

Hey Nilaus You copied the video sections description from the Nuclear movie :)

[@fissionphoenix4995]

Yellow underground belts are really cheap compared to (obviously) any other type of belt. If there's any color of underground that doesn't matter to use more in a build for aesthetic purposes, it's yellow.

[@Zweistein001]

And here stupid me just assumed that the smelting speed is 1/s. Anyway my columns need redoing.

[@singleturbosupra7951]

Just to help you for the future in this game, the crafting speed showed in each crafting building is just a factor for speed (I'm assuming that's why you thought the stone furnace actually makes 1 item per second, since its factor of speed is 1). The actual crafting speed/time is showed in the crafting menu when you put your mouse over the thing you want to craft. This applies to everything, not just smelting. So, for smelting of iron for example the basic crafting speed is 1/3,2s as shown in the video, then when you upgrade to steel furnace with crafting speed (the factor of speed) of 2 instead of 1 it goes up double to 2/3,2s or 1/1,6s. Then also for example Green Circuits you can see from the menu that it takes 0,5 seconds to craft, which means with crafting speed of 1 you would make 2 per second. But since the Assembly machine 2 (the blue one, that you will have early game) has crafting speed of 0,75 (with no modules) you actually make only 1,5 per second Green Circuits per assembly machine, or the time it takes to craft 0,666 seconds (1/1,5s)

[@Zweistein001]

@@singleturbosupra7951 Yea, I've noticed that for composite semi products and end products, but I never bothered to check for iron, copper, steel and stone, instead I just looked at the furnaces and that threw me off.

[@julesnominal1804]

you kind of skip over how to feed the main hub though don't you? you show your feed as an infinite loader, but where is that coming from? im having difficulty with really starting from scratch and one of my problems is how to get the actual raw materials to a different section . But i realize that it may be too boring to cover. I understand in general how you'd want your main bus to be. I figure using splitters to fill up the belt is also too basic to explain. Though i think i saw mention of balancers..

[@julesnominal1804]

imgur.com/4LaqCCb i think this is what i needed so no worries! though i might look through to see if i can find more help with the main bus balancers

[@TheSauceBoss]

That steel setup is actually genius, half the usual space!

[@foobar9761]

@@pulsefel9210 just my thought. splitters are way mre resource (CPU) intensive. but still a very clever design

[@DanielHartz]

Looks like tags made it into the description?

[@Nilaus]

oops fixed

[@rubenoosting5739]

no bp this time?

[@joshuajanicki7713]

pastebin.com/sAzMm6cm

[@rubenoosting5739]

@@joshuajanicki7713 ty

[@jackzahllor7064]

Thank you

[@Cediekuuun]

Can anybody explain what half/a full belt means

[@Nilaus]

Full belt is the maximum number of items a belt can transport (15 for Yellow, 30 for Red and 45 for Blue). Half-belt is when only 1 side of the belt is fully compressed

[@Cediekuuun]

@@Nilaus ohhhhhh thank you Nilaus! I came back to playing Factorio after years of stopping. I learned how to be more efficient and effective thanks to you! Keep the content coming!!!

[@EgnachHelton]

If you want save some space and don't mind spamming some underground belts, you duplex the stone block smelting setup into something like this: pastebin.com/RbfiV3XB

[@vincenthills5024]

dead link

[@TheSauceBoss]

I usually prefer to use burner inserters, I guess to use less power (and pollution) and more coal in the early game lol. Idk if it actually makes any difference

[@bmw123ck]

I haven't checked the numbers, but pollution should be less when using electric inserters. It is more efficient to burn coal in boilers to make the power than burning it individually on each inserter. The bigger the engine, the more efficient it gets This issue translated to real world is: if it was more efficient to go by car (smaller engine), there wouldn't be any buses (bigger engines) for public transportation

[@PeterNLewis]

Burner inserters don't cause pollution directly, but they use way more coal, and that coal has to be mined, and the electric miners end up producing more pollution for the extra coal used than the electric inserters use when fed from coal fired steam engines. See: forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=6850

[@attenonmj3708]

I thought you need undergrounds to get a full belt when smelting.

[@HerrLich36]

No they reworked belts in 0.17 (if i recall correctly), now inserters will always compress belts, without the need for splitter or underground nonsense.

[@jayward8943]

Nilaus has all the blueprints in his pastebin at: pastebin.com/u/NilausTV

[@Nilaus]

Also have an overview in Discord discord.gg/nilaus #master-class

[@marinepoof]

do you have the BP for your city blocks?

[@Nilaus]

coming soon ;) pastebin.com/Fwa7UtAt

[@armanplayzyt9082]

thank

[@pmkaboo2446]

the steel setup seems overly complicated, when you can just reverse the output belts of the iron smelting.

[@justanotheranimeguy]

love it but you shouldve probably called it tutorio

[@samljer]

played this for like, 500 hours, and just stopped. Not sure why, the game is fantastic. Except the biters, that shit needs so much tuning.

[@flaviogardingo8864]

the link pastebin.com/sAzMm6cm dont work

[@Nilaus]

works fine when I click on it

[@typhoic]

how to smelt: type on google "factorioprint smelting"

[@StormEarthFire]

Thank you